beckett's literary legacies

8/12/2019 Beckett's Literary Legacies

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Becketts Literary Legacies


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Becketts Literary Legacies

Edited by

Matthew Feldman and Mark Nixon

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PUBLISHING


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Becketts Literary Legacies, edited by Matthew Feldman and Mark Nixon

This book first published 2007 by

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright 2007 by Matthew Feldman and Mark Nixon and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or

otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN 1-84718-281-X; ISBN 13: 9781847182814


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For Kevin Feldman, one of a pseudo-couple, but always first amongst

equals

And for Sheila and Peter Nixon, with gratitude for their love and support


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The scroll will not stay put. Baffled, Beckett wrestles with the vellum,

whilst I set up the small black ink bottle, with the skinny nib to dip in it.

Finally, I have to hold down the curling corners, as he strives to write what

may be his last lines: he died four years ago last December, 13 days after

my visit. He would have been 88 on April 13. The lines are not new: he

has chosen a quatrain written after his fathers death, and the implicationsfor his own demise, so long attended, are all too clear.

Redeem the surrogate goodbyes

the sheet astream in your hand

who have no more for the land

and the glass unmisted above your eyes.

The sheet is not astream, but bucking and bounding, and his hands are

shaking. Twice he has to stroke out lines, but he still goes on, with thatnear ferocity I associate with him, until the four lines are copied, in the

center of a page. He looks at me, I look down to check, and murmur

appropriate approval. He rolls the vellum, and with due ceremony hands it

over to me, with the carton. Then, with a gesture of finality, he sweeps the

lot, ink bottle, long black pen and spare pages of vellum, into the

wastepaper bin.

John Montague, 17 April 1994


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ...................................................................................... ix

Chapter One................................................................................................ 1

After The End of Samuel Beckett: Influences, Legacies, and Legacees

Matthew Feldman

Chapter Two............................................................................................. 22

Beckett/Blanchot: Debts, Legacies, Affinities

Shane Weller

Chapter Three........................................................................................... 40

Absence as Influence: Samuel Beckett and Paul Muldoon

Jonathan Ellis

Chapter Four............................................................................................. 58Like an idiot at High Mass: Beckettian Motifs in John Banvilles

Art Trilogy

Justin Beplate

Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 78

Transforming the Pseudo-Couple: Beckett in Kenzaburo Oes

Good-Bye, My Book!

Yoshiki Tajiri

Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 95

Rhythms of Doubt: J. M. Coetzee and Samuel Beckett

Steven Matthews

Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 112

Beckett Joyce Mayrcker und kein EndeDirk Van Hulle


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Table of Contentsviii

Chapter Eight.......................................................................................... 12969 Ways To Play Sam Again: Beckettiana in Jrg Laederachs

Works and Letters

Friedhelm Rathjen

Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 152

Text-void: Silent Words in Paul Celan and Samuel Beckett

Mark Nixon

Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 169

Beckett, Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Catastrophe

Elizabeth Barry

Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 188

The Book of Allusions: Where is Samuel Beckett in Paul Austers

The New York Trilogy?Catherine Morley

Chapter Twelve ...................................................................................... 207

Stirring from the field of the possible: Beckett, DeLillo,

and the Possibility of Fiction

Peter Boxall

Contributors ........................................................................................... 227Index ....................................................................................................... 230


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their support in bringing Becketts Literary Legacies to completion,

the editors gratefully acknowledge the support of all contributors to this

volume, as well as the Beckett International Foundation at the University

of Reading and librarians at the Bodleian Library Upper Reserve. We

would also like to thank Andy Nercessian, Carol Koulikourdi, Amanda

Millar and the helpful staff at Cambridge Scholars Publishing generally.We also would like to express our thanks to Tom Crook, Steph Prince, and

Janet Wilson for their assistance in preparing the final manuscript.


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CHAPTER ONE

AFTER THE ENDOF SAMUEL BECKETT:

INFLUENCES,LEGACIES,AND LEGACEES

MATTHEW FELDMAN

In his powerful memoir comprising the epigraph to this volume, John

Montague may well elicit the ultimate legacy from Samuel Beckett (1906-

1989). By December 1989 Becketts end was near, and both men knew it.

The Nobel Laureate, dying in a Parisian old crocks home, copied the

above quatrain, actually written much earlier, for a canonical anthology of

Irish literary greats, The Great Book of Ireland.1The poem Beckett chose

to include in Montagues edition, Da Tagte Es, had itself been originally

composed, like its Dantesque partner, Malacoda, in the long monthsfollowing William Becketts funeral in mid-1933; it is a sons poignant

eulogy to his departed father. But more than this, in Montagues 1994

testimony, Da Tagte Es ultimately comes to act, in a way, as a literary

tombstone commemorating both Becketts.

Nothwithstanding the context offered by Montagues narrative of his

last encounter with Beckett, a deathly theme is already inscribed in the

two poems originally published in Becketts 1935 collection of poetry,

Echos Bones and Other Precipitates. In the first place, both Da Tagte

Es and Malacoda are thematically anchored to that floating signifier ofmortality, the death-ship, which, no more for the land in Da Tagte Es,

issues its last call in the final lines of Malacoda:

all aboard all souls

half-mast aye aye

nay

Moreover, the subject matter of these poemsMalacoda begins thrice

he came, referring to the impassable undertakers measuring, boxing

and burying of Becketts fatherconcerns the paradoxical recognition and


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Chapter One2

rejection of the limits imposed by death.2I will argue this liminality marksBecketts writing as surely as it marks his final days in Les Tiers Temps.

Like the century in which he lived, death is omnipresent in Becketts

work; as if writing about, or indeed beyond, death gave him the striking

vitality noted in Montagues account. An ambivalence toward life itself,

and the imminent solution to that ambivalence, is beautifully conveyed

here with resignation and, perhaps, disappointment just days before

Becketts death; an event dramatically foreshadowed by his binning of pen

and paper, that lifeblood of the writer, after finishing the transcription of

Da Tagte Es. But such a gesture of finality aside, the pre-boarding of his

own death-ship also merited a prolonged, sardonic farewell, as Montague

recounts: And again the eyes focus on me, and I am astounded as always

by their size and color, large as blue marbles. But clouded now, not

watchful or challenging. Im done, again, with the same vehemence.

But it takes such a long time.

This episode seems particularly instructive in approaching SamuelBecketts literary legacies; and more narrowly, as I will presently discuss

with reference to the ensuing eleven chapters, it is also helpful in framing

Becketts Literary Legacies. In A Few Drinks and a Hymn, both the

legacy (Beckett) and the legacee (Montague) are present, establishing a

dialogic connection so frequently absent in literary debts and influences.

Perhaps of even greater importance, in offering a self-chosen legacy to thecountry of his birth at the end of his life, Beckett drew upon a legacy

erected more than fifty years earlier over the death of his father. This is

effected through the bucking transcription of Becketts poem for The

Great Book of Ireland, but also by making a kind ofDoppelgnger(rather

than a pseudo-couple3) of his father: I sat beside my father when he was

dying. Fight, fight, fight, he kept saying. But I have no fight left.4In these

layers of personal-cum-artistic meaning, the richness of which is enhanced

by the falsifiableability to empirically reconstruct pivotal events in both

1933 and 1989, Da Tagte Es thus stands as a memorial to memory, tomortality, and to the poetics of mourning.

All of these tropes bear heavily upon Becketts writing, and upon his

now astronomical literary legacy, as the essays here attest. Through wide-

ranging example, contributors to this volume have undertaken analyses of

Becketts influence on major international writers, most of whom are stillalive and at work forging their own literary legacies. As for Becketts, the

authors surveyed here find that legacy to be both philosophically rich and

artistically challenging. And Beckett scholars of similarly global breadth

consider Becketts art to be a truly revolutionary one, pushing at the veryboundaries of literature. What follows is the first sustained attempt to


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Becketts Literary Legacies 3

gauge the literary reception of that project, famously announced inBecketts 1949 Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit: There are many

ways in which the thing I am trying in vain to say may be tried in vain to

be said [.] of this submission, this admission, this fidelity to failure, a

new occasion, a new term of relation, and of the act which, unable to act,

obliged to act, he makes, and expressive act, even if only of itself, of its

impossibility, of its obligation (Disjecta, 144-45).

In introducing the essays to follow, I want to suggest that through

oftentimes paradoxical (especially postwar) writing, a language of silence,

or a text-void to use Paul Celans neologism, is in fact a recurring, and

in some cases, decisive artistic legacy for authors devising in Becketts

wake. For it is precisely this literary minimalism (Friedhelm Rathjen);

abstract minimalism (Catherine Morley); poetics of impasse (Peter

Boxall); formal disunities (Steven Matthews); or work in regress

(Dirk Van Hulle)that conscious attempt to find a form for abstract

literature undertaken after the completion of Wattin 1945seized upon inthe following essays. Indeed, for the majority of the critics and their

respective case studies here, Becketts influence represents an apparent

schism in the Western literary canon, one perceived to be an artistic

challenge no less than a literary liberation from representationhowever

well-disguised the latter may be.5

This now-famous shift toward the embrace of artistic andepistemological failure is dramatised inKrapps Last Tapeas The vision

at last [.] the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my

most (The Complete Dramatic Works, 220); although Beckett

exhorted his authorised biographer to note that Krapps vision was on

the pier at Dn Laoghaire; mine was in my mothers room. Make that

clear once and for all. In doing so, Knowlson reminds us that even

literary radicals come from somewhere: The image of Beckett

undergoing a conversion like St Paul on the road to Damascus can too

easily distort our view of his development as a writer [.] The ground hadbeen well prepared. Turning toward this ground, that is to say, gesturing

toward the European canon in which Beckett may still be situated, is thus

of help in contextualising even THE revelation.6As regards the latter, in

conversation with another legacee, the American writer Lawrence

Shainberg, Beckett was explicit on the connection between that radical artand the revelatory effect of watching his mother dying from Parkinsons

Disease:

Her face was a mask, completely unrecognizable. Looking at her, I had asudden realization that all the work Id done before was on the wrong

track. I guess youd have to call it a revelation. Strong word, I know, but


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Or does he? For, as is so frequently the case in Becketts interwarwritings, Nixon has shown that the allusion is poached from a secondary

source, in this case John G. Robertsons 1902 A History of German

Literature, which argues that Walther speaks to the modern world almost

as a contemporary (Robertson, 127).10But what Beckett heard, to be sure,

were cries of mourning. As both Nixon and Giuseppina Restivo argue,

Walther is the forerunner of the poetics of pathos; one of the most

famous icons of melancholy (Restivo, 103). This is borne out by

Becketts use of Walther as early as Da Tagte Es, and as late as his 1988

Stirrings Still: for want of a stone to sit like Walther [] not knowing

where he was or how he got there or how to get back to whence he knew

not how he came (The Complete Short Prose, 263). Here, Becketts

artistic trope of impotence dovetails with the melancholy such a failure

invariably brings. This was already implicit in Da Tagte Es, preceding

Stirrings Stillby more than fifty years: doubtless, then, Nixon is right to

suggest that Walther proved to be an enabling instance as Beckettformulated his own endeavour to confront the recent death of his father

(263). This instance was mediated not only by Walther, but by

Robertsons canonical survey of an apparently proto-nationalistic Walther,

itself a title found in Becketts undergraduate syllabus, The Trinity College

Dublin Calendar for the Year 1923-24.

It was not until some ten years later, however, that Becketts grasp ofthe European grand traditionas he said in convincing his friend,

Avigdor Arikha, to accept a commission to paint the Queen Mothermay

be said to crystallise.11 Over this decade, first as an undergraduate at

T.C.D., followed by a lengthy flirtation with academia, and then an intense

period of self-directed study to the mid-1930s, Beckett, above all,

researched the development, or rather, the system, of Western thinking.

Subjects covered over many hundreds of pages in Becketts handwritten

notes from this period include an impressive range of histories on

European literature, art, psychology, philosophy; and therein, morespecific areas of focus such the German Enlightenment, the philosophy of

Arnold Geulincx, painting from the Netherlands, and Christian iconoclasts

(including Porphyry, Dante, Thomas Kempis and Robert Burton). There

overtly, here allusively, many of these interwar notes on the European

cultural tradition made their way into Becketts writings, meaning thatthere is something of the latter in the lament of the narrator in All Strange

Away:Fortunately my father died when I was a boy, otherwise I might

have been a professor, he had set his heart on it. A very fair scholar I was

too, no thought, but a great memory.12

In returning to his fathers death, All Strange Away reveals a kind of


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Chapter One6

theme across Becketts writing, an attempted (and not always successful)supplanting of what the poem Gnome called the loutishness of

learning with a quietistic melancholy (Collected Poems, 7). That is, no

longer talking about mourning, but giving a form to the thing itself, in

kinship with what Beckett notoriously wrote of Joyce in the 1929 essay

DanteBruno.Vico..Joyce: His writing is not about something; it is

that something itself (Disjecta, 27). For unsurprisingly, Joyce is yet

another canonical influence lurking in Becketts superficially autarkic

Da Tagte Es of 1933/34. Less than two years previously, just as Beckett

was moving back into the Joyce circle following laffair Lucia, the

proximate birth of Joyces grandson and death of his father prompted

Ecce Puer, what Ellmann calls his most moving poem (646).13Joyces

meditation ends:

Young life is breathed

Upon the glass,

The world that was not

Comes to pass.

A child is sleeping;

An old man gone.

O, father forsaken,

Forgive your son!

As numerous commentators attest, Beckett could not have been unaware

of Joyces poem at the time of writing Da Tagte Es.14And by alluding to

the tombstone erected by the high priest of literary modernism for his own

father, Beckett here reveals his affinity with that canon in the making:

modernist experimentalism. With this fusion of old and new, Beckett was

to transform this heritage into a literary legacy of his own, a radical art

developedas with Becketts larger engagement with the European

traditionboth out of and in opposition to the Joycean paradigm:

I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of

knowing more, [being] in control of ones material. He was always adding

to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own

way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away,

rather than in adding.15

Now, having contextualised a few of Becketts developmental

influences via the poem Da Tagte Es, these origins need not mean thatEllmann is mistaken in claiming that Beckett is, for his part, sui

generis.16And for many artists, moreover, Beckett is, in a sense, the start


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of a new tradition in literature, as Harold Pinter famously remarked:

The farther he goes the more good it does me. I dont want philosophies,

tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain

basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the

more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him [.] hes

not selling me anything I dont want to buyhe doesnt give a bollock

whether I buy or nothe hasn't got his hand over his heart. Well, Ill buy

his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and

no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is

beautiful.17

In more than forty years since Pinters tribute, artists of all kinds have

lined up to work either on, or indeed after, Beckett. Even a partial listing

reveals a veritable Whos Who of contemporary art: from Arikhas

portraiture to Charles Klabundes illustrations for The Lost Onesor Louis

de Brocquys for Stirrings Still; from the composer Morton Feldmans

work towards Words and Music to the use of Becketts writing by

(especially French) philosophers such as Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze;

and from the edited Grove Press editions of Becketts work by Auster,Coetzee, Rushdie and Albee, to the outpouring of theatrical collaboration

in the recent RTFBeckett on Film production of nineteen plays, including

Damien Hurst, Jeremy Irons, Julianne Moore, Anthony Minghella,

Michael Gambon, David Mamet, Kristin Scott-Thomas, John Gielgud, and

many more.18The point is, charting Becketts legacies is no small beer,

and even the selection of eleven literarylegacies here can only scratch the

surface of Becketts truly global impact.

A collective approach by contributors, however, allows Becketts

Literary Legacies to do exactly this. A shared methodology for charting

Becketts influence rather than a shared interpretation of that influence,

this feature has been glossed above as falsifiable. To hijack Karl

Poppers philosophy on the principles of falsification, such readings ofliterature, rather than being merely suggestive and subjective

interpretations, advance the idea of getting nearer to the truth

[verisimilitude]to the search for theories that agree better with the

facts.19Yet this is no mindless appeal to essentialist reconstructions of

the past, against which Beckett so chafed. And although Beckett may

rightly be regarded as a misologist doubtful that theories, let alone

language, could adequately represent the world, it is important to

remember that Beckett also wrote in his 1936/37 German Diaries:

I am not interested in the unification of the historical chaos any more

than I am in the clarification of the individual chaos, and still less in the


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Chapter One8

anthropomorphisation of the inhuman necessities that provoke the chaos.

What I want is the straws, flotsam, etc., names, dates, births and deaths,

because that is all I can know.20

Relatedly, in constructing their readings, surely, literary critics do not

have, or should not have, the same creative license as their subjects. It is

against, for example, counterfactual connectionsreadings brilliantly

lampooned in David Lodges Small World through Persses nightmares

over writing a paper on the influence of T. S. Eliot on Shakespeare

that Poppers understanding of falsifiablity becomes relevant to literary

criticism (Lodge, 197). Despite ostensibly writing on the philosophy of

science, in seeking a demonstrable basis to make assertions as a necessary

contextualisation for subsequent exegesis, Poppers approach offersscholarship an overdue palliative:

It characterizes as preferable the theory that tells us more; that is to say, the

theory which contains the greater amount of empirical information or

content; which is logically stronger; which has the greater explanatory and

predictive power; and which can therefore be more severely tested by

comparing predicted facts with observations. In short, we prefer an

interesting, daring, and highly informative theory to a trivial one. (Popper,

295)

Clearly, this is not the forum for an extended discussion of the principles

of falsification, nor of its nascent cousin, often referred to as genetic

criticism.21 In the context of more empirical approaches to interpreting

literature, Poppers point is as relevant as it is simple: appealing to inter-

subjective data as a precondition for theorising better facilitates the

growth of knowledgeeven if that knowledge is itself about not-

knowing.22Even if implicitly, historically grounding Becketts influence

is the shared point of departure for all contributions to Samuel Becketts

Literary Legacies. Although not all would share the extent of my ownsentiments above, the essays here, ultimately, all commence from

empirically defensible connections with Becketts art, which precedes the

subsequent interpretations about Becketts influence on authors as diverse

as Sarah Kane, Don DeLillo and Paul Muldoon.

This central perspective underwrites the structure of the presentvolume. That is to say, Beckett has influenced each of the writers surveyed

here in a falsifiable, verifiable, way: even if that legacy is found to be,

paradoxically (and this, again, is Beckett Country), one of absence

(Jonathan Ellis), self-recognition (Shane Weller), or exposure to anunspeakable subject (Justin Beplate). Whereas subsequent essays chase


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Chapter One10

it has many tasks

to which it will never do justice25

Yet what does a scholar do with this material, offered without externalreference, yet apparently so evocative of Beckett in tone and subject? Is it

enough to just leave it at that, as Krapp says? Or is it enough to argue

that existential despair and disillusion with the human condition was

simply a postwar Zeitgeist, one to which artists frequently subscribed,

especially in those countries visited by Carthaginian industrial warfare

during the 1940s? In short, is the subjective sense of an affinity between

Rzewicz and Beckett, and the fact that the latter was fifteen years older

and the far more internationally recognised author, enough to make claims

about a literary legacy at work here?In terms of Becketts Literary Legacies, the answer to these questions

is no. To merely suggest that Rzewicz and Beckett evoke or comparewith each other is not falsifiable: why not make the opposite claim,

namely that the two fail to evoke or compare with one another? Both

contentions depart from wholly subjective criteria that, without reference

to a verifiable connection between the two, cannot be shown to be false.

That Beckett seems to be everywhere in Rzewiczs work is not argument

enough to show that he may, instead, be nowhere at all; a phantom

conjured in the critics, not the artists, imagination. Any approach toBecketts influence upon Rzewicz (let alone the other way around!) istherefore, in Poppers appropriated terminology, not yet a theory able to

be either tested or contested. More evidence is therefore necessary. Or to

pinch Mark Twains celebrated maxim, Get your facts first, and then you

can distort them as much as you please.

In doing so, trawling for clues through journals off the beaten track

soon turns up a suggestive article, one linking Rzewicz to Beckett via

Martin Esslins renowned Theatre of the Absurd: Like the plays of

Witkacy, Gombrowicz, Beckett, and Ionesco, Rzewiczs dramas are notexclusively literary in seeking to physically express psychic states and

abstract qualities. Even more importantly, Halina Falipowiczs

Theatrical Reality in the Plays of Tadeusz Rzewicz cites an

Anglophone translation of Birth Rate: The Biography of a Play for the

Theatre. Here, Rzewicz explicitly relates Becketts drama to his own:

No political treatises, sketches of manners and morals! [] these are

secondary matters for the art of the drama. The new art of the dramaafter

Witkacy and Beckettmust start from the problem of a new technique for

writing plays, not a sensational topic [.] in Beckett for the first time

we are witnesses not only to the apparent action, but also to the


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disintegration of this action on the stage [] in Beckett this disintegration

is the action. To define this more exactly: the exterior theatre has already

become a historical theatre: a theatre whose evolution has come to an

endIm not talking about the interpretation of those texts by directorsand critics. Thus I divide theatre into exterior theatre and interior

theatre.26

Needless to say, Becketts postwar workthat new art of the dramais

also considered interior theatre by Rzewicz. Referring to the latters

comment that Beckett is the Shakespeare of our times, Tony Howard

then takes this explicit admiration and transforms it into a reading of

influence; applying it back, as it were, to Rzewiczs drama itself: he has

a very particular debate with Beckett who resonates across plays like TheCard Index, The Interrupted Act; and moreover,Happy Daysbecame the

nucleus of The Old Woman Broods (1969), his redrafting of Becketts

vision in which a bag lady gives birth in the rubbish dump we are makingof the planet.27

With such critical guidance in hand, the radical experimentalism and

minimalistic bathos of Tadeusz Rzewiczs art emerges as a demonstrable

literary legacy from Samuel Beckett. Or rather, to put the horse before the

cart, the falsifiable influence of Beckett upon Rzewicz facilitates

consequent interpretations like mine (that sense of a shared radicalexperimentalism and minimalistic bathos). The above Polish scholars

have, in a sense, empirically facilitated my subsequent theoretical linkingof Beckett with Rzewicza connection of two major postwar writers

still awaiting proper treatment. Suffice it to say here that Rzewiczs

theatre contains fascinating echoes of Becketts, with the latter figuring as

a silent comrade in arms combating Classical plays with both the

comedy and melancholy of new theatre.

Interestingly, by way of brief example, Rzewicz interrupts the second

act of his 1963 The Interrupted Act, a play taking as its themes loss,

incapacity, and the impossibility of dramatically representing these, with a

three page authorial NOTE. This authorial aside is an extraordinary,

veiled defense of Beckett against those metaphysical beagles and their

mystificationproducers and critics, of coursethrough sentiments

the latter might well recognise:

these same people suddenly become impoverished realists and deride the

poet-dramatist who dared to place people in rubbish bins, in the ground or

in urns. They raised no objections to people being placed in hell or heaven

but they cant come to terms with people who entertain themselves withconversation on a rubbish heap. This is strange indeed!28


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Chapter One12

This vision of ruined, or rather rubbished, humanity itself derives in nosmall measure from Rozewiczs personal history. Like Paul Celan,

Rzewicz was a victim of Nazi racism during World War Two, and felt

the need to approach this (particularly) inexpressible experience in stark,

uncompromising language. Yet at the same time, and perhaps by way of a

tentative response, Rzewiczs appropriation and literary employment of

Sam, and elsewhere B.much like Friederike Mayrckers likely

allusion to Beckett as Samuel in Stilleben (and, as Van Hulle makes

clear, as S. in her drafts toward that 1991 novel)appears as a literary

approach to veiling Becketts presence here, at the ends of representational

literature; and maybe, for these authors, here, at the ends of human

existence. The interplay of these artistic concerns about the postwar world,

and about the ungraspable nature of the modern world and the chafing

need to bear witness to human existence after the Holocaust (as Nixon

writes of Celans poetry), is visible both in Becketts writings and, it

seems, as part of his literary legacyparticularly as suggested in thisvolume by Nixon and Van Hulles essays. This also may be witnessed

in Rzewiczs drama, as with his 1979 play Whats More Whats Less,

which invokes Sam (and also the 1960 How It Is) as a way of

negotiating the paradoxes of speech and silence; of life and representing

life; of going on after the realities of Auschwitz-Birkenau:

He: Youve noticed havent you theres more and more everything but less

and less us?

I: do you still write Sam?

He: in one of my stories the hero keeps his finger stuck up his arse.

I: can heroes keep their fingers up their arses?

He: not on a monument just in life.

I: youve noticed havent you Sam your problems are at deaths door

disintegrating the heros dying not waving a banner but with a finger up

his arse .

[.]He: I was born in a grave theres less and less of me in Paris29

It is precisely this triangulation of Becketts oeuvre, its artistic

employment by a subsequent author, and the critical opportunities offered

by falsifiable criticism, thatBecketts Literary Legaciesexplores. As with

Rzewicz, Becketts influence on the selection of writers examined here

extends to both form and content. Yet as Shane Weller makes clear in the

ensuing chapter, Beckett/Blanchot: Debts, Legacies, Affinities,

delineating influence is no easy matterparticularly with respect toBecketts literary contemporaries. One such figure, Maurice Blanchot,

presents especial challenges to documenting literary debts, let alone


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legacies. In confronting these interpretative problems regarding a Beckett-Blanchot correspondence, Weller sets the stage for chapters, while at the

same time remaining cautious about making too many assertions in

Beckett Country. This sense is also given over by the next two essays,

relocating this now-globalised Beckett within an Irish context. In

Absence as Influence: Samuel Beckett and Paul Muldoon, Jonathan Ellis

considers both the playful surface of Muldoons references to Beckett (forexample, His Nibs Sam Bethicket), in addition to finding a deeper

linguistic affinity connecting the two. Becketts paradoxically absent

presence is encountered as a consolation in Muldoons poetry and, for

Ellis, raises the spectre of artistically articulating grief, of expressing the

inexpressible, in this case through elegiac poetry. As has also been

previously discussed, Justin Beplate commences his chapter on John

Banville, Like an idiot at High Mass: Beckettian Motifs in John

Banvilles Art Trilogy, through the divergent Joyce and Beckett,

convincingly demonstrating that Banville was a partisan for the former.

This influence itself recalls Muldoons characterisation of Beckett as the

Lord of Liminality. For Beplate finds that, in Banvilles novels, Beckett

mediates inner and outer worldsdescribed in the 1936 Murphy as the

Geulingian distinction between little and big worldsthrough the

refuge afforded by non-representative art. But such writing after being

does not preclude the dangers of linguistic aporia, contradiction andliterary mimesis, tropes treated both in Banvilles Art Trilogy and

Beplates analysis of it.These essays are followed by groundbreaking scholarship on two

Nobel Laureates; Kenzaburo Oe receiving the award 25 years after

Beckett, and J. M. Coetzee doing so nine years later, in 2003. In his

analysis of another Beckett-influenced trilogy, Yoshiki Tajiris

Transforming the Pseudo-Couple: Beckett in Kenzaburo Oes Good-Bye

My Book! focuses closely upon the 2005 book in his title, forming the last

of Oes Changeling Trilogy (or Pseudo-Couple Trilogy), one not yetavailable in English. Here, the debt to Beckett inGood-Bye My Book!may

have been reignited by the recent death of Yasunari Takahashi, a pioneer

of Beckett Studies in Japan and long-standing friend of Oe, who, in 2002,

offered a eulogy at Takahashis funeral. Locating Becketts influence upon

Oe through the structural employment of ghost-like doubles forming a

recurrant pattern in both writers work, Tajiri appeals to the European

tradition in approaching the Japanese Laureates artistic employment of

doubleness. By contrast, Steven Matthews chapter, Rhythms of

Doubt: J. M Coetzee and Samuel Beckett, finds in Becketts influenceupon Coetzee a much more explicit and personal relationship. For not only


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Chapter One14

did Coetzees encounter with Wattearn him a PhD., it earned an equallyprestigious place in the 2002 memoir Youthfor Becketts wartime novel,

as both hilarious narrative and creative catalyst. But for Matthews, it is

Coetzees imagining of Beckett as an outsider, as a reflexive de-

creatorin stark contrast to his more quantitative doctorate, The English

Fiction of Samuel Beckett: An Essay in Stylistic Analysisthat comes to

inform Coetzees art both aesthetically and, indeed, politically.

The following three chapters, forming a miniature trilogy of their

own, consider Becketts influence on authors writing in German. The first

of these, BeckettJoyceMayrcker und kein Ende, returns to the

Joyce-Beckett dichotomy; this time transposed to an Austrian context.

Through a paradigmatic example of genetic criticism, Dirk Van Hulle

centres upon Friederike Mayrckers archival holdings in Vienna for

evidence of direct, manuscript engagement with Becketts art. These are

identified and subsequently tied to Stilleben [Still Life] and Magische

Bltter [Magic Pages]neither, again, available in English to datethrough a familiar engagement with failure, liminality, and what H. Porter

Abbott has called autography, all of which Van Hulle discerns in

Mayrckers own Beckettian legacy. Another overtly empirical approach

is taken by Friedhelm Rathjen, who investigates the similarly untranslated

Jrg Laederach, an experimental Swiss writer who, like Paul Muldoon,

offers a thicket of textual references to recent canonical writers. But viahis own correspondence with the author, Rathjen elicits a close affinity

with Becketts writing in 69 Ways To Play Sam Again: Beckettiana in

Jrg Laederachs Works and Letters. Especially in longer prose like

Worstward Ho, Rathjen suggests that it is the radical nature of that

literature of the unword that Laederach admires in Beckett: Although

Becketts becoming silent seems inherent in his work and thus to be the

most logical in the history of literature, I could hear him talk on forever.30

In like vein, Paul Celan remarked of Beckett thats probably the only

man here I could have had an understanding with; the here perhapsitalicised by the Romanian poets suicide only a month later. As is

considered in Text-void: Silent Words in Samuel Beckett and Paul

Celan, although never meeting (despite inhabiting the same city for a

generation) fellow expatriate Parisians Celan and Beckett shared a post-

Holocaust sensitivity largely at variance with dominant artistic trends afterthe Second World War. As Nixon shows, Theodor Adornos writings on

this poetic survival after 1945 located in these two writers an honesty

denied virtually everyone else. By empirically linking Celan to Becketts

worksmost notably The Unnamable, which Celan had his French classat the Ecole Normale Superieure (attempt to!) translate into German


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Nixons essay finds that the dispassionate and opaque writing of both menbears stoic witness to the destructive capacities of the modern world.

This stoicism is certainly found by the final three Anglophone

legacees comprising Becketts Literary Legacies. In fact, it is Sarah

Kanes reading of Beckett that Liz Barrytaking her cue from several of

Kanes own interviewscasts in terms of a theatrical inheritance, one

derived from classical tragedy and extending back to the Ancient Greeks.

But as Beckett, Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Catastrophe makes clear,

this stoic resignation need not divest itself of the gallows humour Kane

discerns in Becketts plays, kitted out as it is with all the expletives of

contemporary life. This absurd approach to modern drama substantially

narrows the gulf between form and content for both playwrights, while

also giving rise to a similar, non-realist attitude undertaken as a means to

address this problematic. And as Barry intruigingly suggests, by starkly

facing the catastrophic Endgame of nuclear modernity, Beckett is, perhaps

for the first time, aligned in Kanes writing with an historic Stoic traditionhelping to address this very contemporary concern. Indeed, the empirical

link between Beckett and Stoicism has only recently been catalogued by

scholars, forming as they do a portion of Becketts newly-released

interwar notes One such passage, an entry entitled Epictetus in

Becketts German Exercise book, dated 11 August 1936, is translated and

presented here for the first time:

Wenn du dich verbessern willst, so hre auf, auf diese Art mit dir selbst zu

reden: wenn ich meine Geschfte versume, werd ich keinen

Lebensunterhaltung [sic] haben; wenn ich meinen Diener nicht strafe, wird

er zu einem Taugenichts. Den lieber Angst- und Kummerfrei Hungers

sterben, als unruhig im Ueberfluss zu leben; und lieber einem schlechten

Diener haben, als unglcklich zu sein. Probier es doch erst mit

Kleinigkeiten. Wird etwas Oel verschttet oder gestohlen, so sage dir:

So viel kostet die Ruhe; umsonst ist nur der Tod.Und wenn du deinen

Diener rufst, bedenke, dass er vielleicht nicht kommen wird; und wenn erauch kommt, dass er vielleicht nicht so tun wird, als du es von ihm

verlangst. In der Lage zu sein, dich berhaupt stren zu knnen, passt ihm

schlecht, und dir noch viel schlechter.

[If you want to improve yourself, then stop talking to yourself in this way:

If I neglect my business I will have no livelihood, if I do not punish my

servant he will become a good-for-nothing. For it is better to die of hunger

free from fear and care than to live a life of anxiety in the lap of luxury.

And it is better to have a bad servant than to be unhappy. Try it out with

little things first. If some oil is spilled or stolen say to yourself: This is thecost of peace of mind; the only thing that comes free is death. And when

you call your servant, think that he only might come, and that if he comes,


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Chapter One16

he might not do what you ask. To put yourself in the position where he can

disturb you does not suit him and suits you even less.]31

But if death is free, crawling out from Becketts enormous shadow canbe particularly costly in terms of artistic development, as Paul Auster has

recognised: I was in a sense crushed by Beckett. It took me a while to get

out from under the burden of Beckett. As is also revealed in Catherine

Morleys account, The Book of Allusions: Where is Samuel Beckett in

Paul Austers The New York Trilogy?, Becketts influence upon Auster

allowed the young American writer to find his own voice in The New

York Trilogy, one nonetheless in key with familiar Beckettian themes:

solitude, dislocation, in addition to the pulp fiction detective

elements and triptych format incorporated into both trilogies fragmentednarratives. By comparing trilogies in a manner similar to Tajiris analysis

of Kenzaburo Oe, Morley finds that Austers investigation of traditionalmetaphysical questions of identitydiscussed through the literary

employment of Doppelgngers, the failures of expression, and other

themes taken up in several essays in this volumeowes much to the

philosophical fictions ofMolloy,Malone Dies,and The Unnamable; along

with Waiting for Godot, those centrepieces of Becketts postwar leap to

fame. In the final essay, Stirring from the field of the possible: Beckett,

DeLillo, and the Possibility of Fiction, Peter Boxall returns to the issue ofhow to write after Beckett; the suggestion being, therefore, that Beckett isin some sense the last writer, the artist at the very perimeter of

experimental literature, of non-representational art, and perhaps even of

linguistic expression. In keeping with previous contributions, Boxall

argues for a generative relationship between his comparative case study,

Don DeLillo, and Beckett, finding that the former, like Paul Auster,

needed to find a way to go on creating after texts like Endgame and

Worstward Ho. DeLillo, in Boxalls analysis, finds a tentative, paradoxical

way of proceedingand indeed, of going on over thousands of pagesafter the near-impossible journey taken by Becketts revolutionary writing.

Boxall thus concludes this volume through explicit engagement with a

question lurking throughout: Can Beckett even have a literary legacy?

Stoic, funny, bathetic, melancholy, hard, easy, stark, philosophical,

psychological, pathological and on and on: what, finally, was Becketts

message from which to draw a legacy? If, as Rzewicz suggests in The

Interrupted Act (and as many others have taken it upon themselves tosubsequently point out), weartists, critics, actors, directors, even the

wider publichave not yet properly understood Beckett, how can wepossibly make sense of his oeuvre?

To be sure, that Samuel Beckett has meant so many different things to


27/30


so many different people is obvious in both the contributors and theirauthors voices throughout Becketts Literary Legacies. In the generation

since Becketts death, that there is no one answerand certainly not a

falsifiable one!to such interpretative quandaries is doubtless a good, or

rather, not such a bad, thing. Yet in using a more empirical approach as a

basis for intertextual comparison here, the contributors do offer a shared

methodology; and furthermore, they also offer a shared sense that

Becketts artistic project was at the very outer remove of expression; that

this is as far, or very nearly as far, as literature can go. If Joyce was

literary modernisms high priest, Beckett, then, was its undertaker. And if

Beckett wrote a kind of eulogy for the Western tradition of literature (of

which he was paradoxically a part) in his postwar art in the wake of that

celebrated artistic vision at last, perhaps his legacy does somehow

represent The End:

The sea, the sky, the mountains and the islands closed in and crushed me in

a mighty systole, then scattered to the uttermost confines of space. The

memory came faint and cold of the story I might have told, a story in the

likeness of my life, I mean without the courage to end or the strength to go

on.32

Notes

1 John Montague, A Few Drinks and A Hymn.

2 Samuel Beckett, Malacoda, in Collected Poems, 26. Da Tage Es is also

reprinted in Collected Poems, 27.

3 For a discussion of the distinction between Becketts pseudo-couples and the

nineteenth century tradition of Dppelgangers in Western literature, see Yoshiki

Tajiris Transforming the Pseudo-Couple: Beckett in Kenzaburo Oes Good-Bye,

My Book! in this volume.

4 Montague, A Few Drinks and A Hymn.

5 This argument is also made by Pascale Casanova, who argues Becketts was agenuinely autonomous literature, freed from the imperatives of representation in

order to inaugurate a different branch of literary modernity (105-6); besides, the

title to this book is clear enough, too: Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of Literary

Revolution.

6 Samuel Beckett, Krapps Last Tape, in The Complete Dramatic Works; James

Knowlson,Damned to Fame, 352-53.

7 Samuel Beckett to Israel Shenker (on 5/5/1956), reprinted in Graver and

Federman, eds., Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, 148. For more on Joyce

and Beckett, see the latters interviews with Gabriel DAuberede and Tom Driver

in ibid.; see also Friedhelm Rathjen, ed., In Principle, Beckett is Joyce; and morerecently, Colleen Jaurretche, ed.,Beckett, Joyce and the Art of the Negative.


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Chapter One18

8 For example, see Enoch Braters Intertextuality in Lois Oppenheim, ed.,

Palgrave Advances in Samuel Beckett Studies, 30-44; John Pilling, A Samuel

Beckett Chronology; see also Samuel Beckett Today/AujourdHui 3, subtitled

Intertexts in Becketts Work.9 See Mark Nixon, Scraps of German: Samuel Beckett reading German

Literature.

10 For more on Becketts interwar scavenging of scholarly texts, see my Becketts

Books, ch. 2.

11 Atik, Anne,How it was, 117.

12 Samuel Beckett, All Strange Away, in The Complete Short Prose, 158. For

details of Becketts notes from this period, see Beckett Today/AujourdHui 16,

subtitled Catalogues of Becketts reading notes and other manuscripts at Trinity

College Dublin, with supporting essays.

13 For details on Becketts relationship with Lucia Joyce, see KnowlsonsDamnedto Fame, ch. 5.

14 See Ruby Cohn,A Beckett Canon, 61; C. A. Ackerley and S. E. Gontarski, The

Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, 126; and John Pilling,Beckett Before Godot,

88-91.

15 Knowlson,Damned to Fame, 352.

16 For a host of other views of Beckett, see the Grove Atlantic website at:

www.groveatlantic.com/grove/bin/wc.dll?groveproc~genauth~56~0~info~praise.

17 Harold Pinter, Beckett, in John Calder, ed.,Beckett at 60, 86.

18 See, for example, Fionnuala Croke, ed., Samuel Beckett: A Passion for

Paintings; James and Elizabeth Knowlson, eds., Beckett Remembering /Remembering Beckett; and the website http://www.beckettonfilm.com (last

accessed 29/4/07).

19 Karl Popper, Truth, Rationality and the Growth of Knowledge, in Conjectures

and Refutations, 326.

20 Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 244. Beckett jotted misology = hatred of

theories in his 1930s Whoroscope notebook; for further details, see my

Becketts Books: A Cultural History of Samuel Becketts Interwar Notes, 7.

21 For a discussion of genetic criticism, see Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-

Textes, edited by Jed Deppman, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden. Dirk Van

Hulles introduction toBeckett the Europeanalso discusses some of these issues inrelation to Beckett.

22 For further discussion of the seemingly paradoxical relation between Becketts

scepticism and Poppers view of the growth of knowledge, see my Beckett and

Popper, or, What Stink of Artifice.

23 See, for example, Adam Czerniawski in Tadeusz Rzewicz, Conversation with

the Prince, 11-22.

24 M. J. Krysnki and R. A. Maguire, Translators Introduction, in Tadeusz

Rzewicz, Survivor and Other Poems, xi and x; Samuel Beckett, The Capital of

the Ruins, inThe Complete Short Prose, 278.

25 Rzewicz, Survivor and Other Poems, 145.26 Falipowicz, Halina, Theatrical Reality in the Plays of Tadeusz Rzewicz, 457-

58; Tadeusz Rzewicz, Birth Rate: The Biography of a Play for the Theatre, 73.


29/30


27 Tony Howard Fragments from a Personal File: The Internal Theatre of

Tadeusz Rzewicz, in Tadeusz Rzewicz,Reading the Apocalypsein Bed, 14.

28 Tadeusz Rzewicz, The Interrupted Act, in ibid., 118-19.

29 Tadeusz Rzewicz, Whats More, Whats Less, in Reading the Apocalypse inBed, 299-300.30 Samuel Beckett, German Letter of 1937, in Disjecta, 173; Jrg Laederach,

letter to Friedhelm Rathjen of 11 January 1989, cited in 69 Ways To Play Sam

Again: Beckettiana in Jrg Laederachs Works and Letters, in this volume.

31 Clare Street Notebook, RUL MS 5003, 39 and 41; private translation I am

especially grateful to Edward Beckett, the Beckett International Foundation, and

Reading University Library for permission to cite this notebook, and also to Mark

Nixon for his assistance with this passage.

32 Samuel Beckett, The End, in The Complete Short Prose, 99.

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Samuel Beckett(London: Faber and Faber, 2006).

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beckett's literary legacies

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